The immobility of the mobile teacher: how teachers change jobs in a segregated local school-market

ABSTRACT

This study examines job-changing patterns of secondary school teachers in a segregated local school market in Sweden. In an initial step, we use information on pupils’ resources to hierarchically group schools in four groups, where schools with similar pupil bases are sorted together. By interviewing 29 teachers, the conclusion is that when teachers change employer, they navigate or are recruited to schools that are similar to schools where their professional approach was formed (formative school). The significance of the formative school is important since the teacher synchronises subjective professional beliefs with the institutional conditions and logics that produce the local working conditions. This process means that the mobility of teachers is limited to schools within the same or adjacent school groups. This indicates that teachers might be locked in to limited sectors of the labour market by the same market forces that segregate pupils on the school market.

KEYWORDS:

• Career
• institutional logics
• professional disposition
• school market
• school segregation
• teacher

Introduction

Since the early 1990s, the Swedish school system has changed “into one of the most liberal in terms of decentralization and market elements” (Lundahl et al., 2013, p. 499). A noticed part of the transformed system was that a voucher, attached to each pupil, was granted to whichever stakeholder that was prepared to take responsibility for that pupil’s education according to the applicable framework. The schools were thus turned into market-conscious actors, with pupil recruitment incorporated as a fundamental and necessary element of each school’s operations. The pupils’ schooling was transformed into a commodity (Bunar, 2012). And so, a school market was established (Forsberg, 2018) consisting of municipal schools competing for pupils with independent, corporate, non-profit and idea-driven schools as well as profitmaking schools owned by large conglomerates based in a growing education business sector (Bunar, 2012). The competition for pupils has contributed to a school market where the organisational logic is characterised by differences between schools rather than similarities, which was the case before the marketisation (Dannefjord & Persson, 2022).

Research shows that free school choice contributes to reinforced social segregation in general (Wilson & Bridge, 2019) and Sweden isn’t an exception (Söderström & Uusitalo, 2010). Parents with strong social, cultural, and economic resources are more active and capable in determining where to find the most valuable options in the school market for their children (Ball, 2003; Ball & Vincent, 1998). Parents with less such resources are not, to the same extent, activated by the free choice. Their limited resources limit their possibilities to make active choices for their children. This means that their children end up at the school in the immediate area together with other children that lack social, cultural, and economic resources (Andersson et al., 2012; Ball, 2003; Berisha & Seppänen, 2017).

Today, it is possible to observe how “the choice revolution” (Richardson, 2004, p. 238) has led to a reinforcement of distinct school hierarchies structured by social and economic variables (see Table 1). On one end, we have schools with a strong position in the hierarchy. These schools have a high proportion of pupils from socially and economically solid homes and with strong performances in school. On the other end, we have schools with a weaker position. These are mainly populated by pupils from homes with significantly less social and economic resources and whose performances in school are generally weaker. The proportion of pupils from a Swedish ethnic background is higher in strong schools, while pupils with immigrant background and weaker knowledge of the Swedish language are gathered in weak schools (Brandén & Bygren, 2018; Yang-Hansen & Gustafsson, 2016).

Table 1. Hierarchical grouping of schools and summaries of variables.

Group	Number of schools	Family average income^a	Share of pupils with immigrant background	Share of highly educated parents	Average final grade (max 320)	Share of pupils reaching knowledge requirements in every subject
1	11	50,676	21.8	56.4	272.0	93.0
2	11	43,421	26.7	36.5	241.2	75.9
3	11	30,558	63.7	29.0	218.8	64.6
4	11	23,818	85.9	15.2	177.6	40.9

^a Median on school-level based on fathers’ monthly income in SEK.

Less is known of how school hierarchies affect how teachers manoeuvre the increasingly segregated labour market. In Sweden, teachers are free to apply for jobs anywhere and not assigned to any designated position in the labour-market. Teachers’ employers have great freedom to determine the individual teacher's salary and do not have to follow pre-set tariffs. Despite this apparent freedom both for employers to hire and teachers to choose job, teacher mobility and its relationship to the school market is an under-developed subject in research. It is known that teachers change job more frequently (Bertilsson, 2020) but less is known about how their mobility at the labour-market is structured in relation to a segregated school-market. This study is looking to address this by answering the question: What patterns do teachers follow when looking for and changing to new positions in a segregated school market, and how can these patterns be explained?

The concept of institutional logics has been used to understand the width of differences between schools in the local school hierarchy. To understand how teachers, in terms of individuals, relate and adapt to the objective structures of the school-market, the concept of social dispositions, most related to the works of Pierre Bourdieu, has been elaborated.

Previous research

In the segregated school-market, teachers encounter socioeconomically homogenised groups of pupils. Previous research describes how pupils’ collective resources affect teachers’ perception of a certain school. The teachers argue that differences in resources differentiate the pupils’ ability to meet the school’s moral, social, and academic requirements (Becker, 1952; Boone et al., 2018; Dewulf et al., 2017). This leads to a school structure where teacher perceptions of the schools coincide with the material conditions. These perceptions have been discussed in terms of teachability (e.g., Van Houtte, 2011), which has been defined as “/ … / school-wide beliefs of teachers about the capacities and willingness of their pupils to learn” (Agirdag, 2018, p. 266).

A segregated school-structure was discussed by Becker (1952) in his classic study on public school teachers in Chicago. The pupils’ learning abilities, discipline, and ability to stay within the school’s moral acceptability, place the schools in a formally horizontal order, and thus teachers change of employer as horizontal mobility. Becker argues that the aggregate socioeconomic background of the pupils in the particular school is an important indicator that contributes to place the school in a hierarchy. A similar type of class-related school-hierarchy can be observed in today’s segregated school market in Sweden.

Becker discovered that teachers mainly had what he describes as a horizontal professional career, which means that they remained working as teachers, rather than aspiring to other roles inside the school-system. Career steps that did not involve leaving the teaching profession were simply impossible (see also Lortie, 1975). However, when changing jobs, teachers applied for positions in areas with a stronger pupil composition. The Chicago-teachers often started their professional careers in schools with pupils lacking in resources and then applied to schools in more affluent areas. Much later, similar patterns have been observed in several international studies (e.g., Clotfelter et al., 2011; Feng, 2009; Feng, 2010; Greenberg & McCall, 1974; MacLean, 1992; Prost, 2013) and in studies of Swedish teacher mobility (Karbownik & Martinson, 2014).

However, Becker also discovered a second career strategy, which makes the nuances in some of these referred studies interesting. It involved teachers staying at the same school, adapting to its conditions, and making a career by gaining more influence and prestige among their colleagues. They chose not to relocate to other schools because they found methods that worked well in that particular school.

These careers were the product of a process of adjustment to the particular work situation, which, while operating in all schools, is seen most clearly where it has such a radical effect on the further development of the career, tying the teacher to a school which would otherwise be considered undesirable. (Becker, 1952, p. 473)

Becker’s first career strategy seems to have had an impact on later research, while the second is strangely under-developed, almost absent (van Zanten & Grospiron, 2001 is one rare exception). Without reference to Becker, Parding et al. (2017) find, from a cross-national study (Sweden and Australia) in a segregated school-market, “that a teacher learns how to be a teacher in a specific setting” (p. 121), something that make them “develop context-specific competencies, which may be applicable and useful in their current context, but which they themselves see as context-bound, making it potentially difficult to change employment context” (p. 121). The context-specific skills contribute to lock in teachers to the type of schools where their skills are desirable and functional but also, at the same time, lock them out from other schools (see also Stacey, 2019).

Feng (2010) shows, in an American context, that many schools have a within-school career where teachers move from classes with low performing pupils to classes with high performing pupils, within the same school, as they gain more experience. This might explain what seems like a contradiction between Fengs and Pardings et al.’s findings. If a school is in a context where the teachers are supposed to strive from low performance to high performance classes, this might amplify the ambitions and professional orientations that generate a movement from low performance schools to high performance schools. There are, however, no indications that schools in Sweden are internally differentiated in the way that Feng describes.

Karbownik and Martinson (2014) present the results that indicate that conditions in Sweden might differ from other countries. They show that teachers don’t tend to leave schools with a high proportion of immigrant pupils. As presented above, the proportion of immigrant pupils is in general higher in weak schools. They do show that teachers leave schools with pupils with low prior knowledge, but this result is based on upper secondary schoolteachers, not secondary school teachers, a condition that makes a relevant comparison difficult.

The question that arises is if there is a way to explain the seemingly contradictory results from the above referred research. In the attempt to find an explanation, it seems relevant not to focus on the presupposition that teachers move upwards in the school hierarchy, but instead try to understand what the local context means to the teacher and how it affects career choices and mobility patterns. In this article, the collected data therefore stress a further development of the second Becker career. This will provide a different image of the teacher career, as well as present proposals to how this career can be understood in relation to the segregated school market.

A theoretical framework

Parding et al. (2017) claim that a transfer from one school to another is considered “risky and thus unattractive” (p. 124) when the teaching profession is “becoming increasingly diversified, where different schools and different places create very different conditions under which teachers work” (p. 124), the individual teacher put herself in risk of simply not knowing how to do the job when she involves herself in a job-transfer. Becker found that teachers involved in the second career gradually “acquires a routine of work which is customary, congenial, and predictable to the point that any change would require a drastic change in deep-seated habits” (p. 474).

We can assume that this change is even more drastic when schools differ from each other. In a cohesive school system, institutional logic would be translatable between different schools and transfers between schools would not risk sacrifices and experiences of social and professional discrepancies. The segregated school-market, though, has accelerating differences between schools in terms of how to organise the professional work in relation to the composition of pupils. The differentiation of the Swedish school system has contributed to schools developing what theoretically can be understood as local institutional logics, defined by Thornton and Ocasio (1999) as … 

… the socially constructed, historical pattern of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organise time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality. (p. 804)

Since schools develop in a direction that distinguishes them from other schools, the schools’ institutional logic will not necessarily be valid any more than at the individual school or at schools with similar pupil composition and/or schools organised from similar pedagogical ideas. To be able to do the job and become established as a teacher at the school, the teacher incorporates the professional approach produced by the school’s unique structural conditions (see also Parding et al., 2017; Stacey, 2019).

In theory, this process of incorporation of the school-specific or local institutional logic in the teacher can be likened to a process of synchronisation where the teacher’s objective beliefs and aspirations coincide with the school’s objective structural and qualitative conditions. With inspiration from how Bourdieu (2020) describe how objective structures are embodied in the individual as “the mechanism or logic whereby objective structures and conditions become transformed into permanent dispositions” (p. 27), the teachers’ continued action patterns can occur on “the basis of the most ineradicable adherence to the established order” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 164) where their social presence in the teaching profession is centred on “/ … / participating in an ‘objective intention’ which surpasses conscious intentions” (Robbins, 2019, p. 170). The professional disposition is adapted to a specific type of school that gives the teacher good opportunities to perform in a way that is acknowledged locally but strange in other schools.

Fundamentally, this professional disposition is individual, but tends to assume a collective form when the incorporation process takes place under similar social circumstances, i.e., at schools with similar pupil compositions. In other words, teachers who establish themselves in similar schools also incorporate similar professional approaches. This means that on a differentiated school-market, a transfer from one school to another jeopardise the very professional fundament of the individual teacher.

Data and methods

The study was conducted in a large Swedish city. The area is densely populated, highly segregated in relation to most other Swedish urban areas, and the number of schools competing for pupils is high. The area is limited in terms of size, making it possible to commute to all schools in the area. Formally there are no major practical obstacles for the teachers to transfer between schools in the area.

With the intention of illustrating the local school hierarchy, statistics from Statistics Sweden and the SIRIS database offered by the National Agency for Education describing the schools’ pupil composition, have been used (see variables in Table 1). The pupils’ collective resources differ between schools and this measurable difference correlates well with the schools’ results. In addition to the statistical data, 29 interviews with teachers working in the area were conducted between 2018 and 2019. The interviewed teachers are further presented in Appendix.

A hierarchical grouping of schools

To clearly outline the local school hierarchy, we have used data that, on the one hand, take the pupils’ academic performance into account and, on the other hand, show the schools’ social standing in relation to the inherited socioeconomic resources of the pupils. When it comes to academic performance, the average grades in year nine (median on a school level), and the proportion of all pupils at the school who passed all year-nine subjects, has been used. When it comes to the pupils’ inherited socioeconomic resources, we used data pertaining to parents’ level of education (proportion of pupils with at least one parent having higher education) and income level (median calculated based on the father’s income), as well as data on the proportion of pupils with an immigrant background (born outside of Sweden or having two foreign-born parents) obtained from anonymised registers of individuals from Statistics Sweden.

The pupils’ inherited socioeconomic resources are significant as social positions seem to affect how active pupils and parents are on the school market when multiple choices are available (see Ball, 2003; Ball & Vincent, 1998; Berisha & Seppänen, 2017). For this same reason, we also use the proportion of pupils with a foreign background as a variable when stratifying the schools (see Brandén & Bygren, 2018; Yang-Hansen & Gustafsson, 2016).

Regardless of which of these variables is used, the hierarchy of the schools, with only minor shifts, turns out the same. At the bottom, we find schools with weak academic results, populated with predominately pupils with weak inherited resources and a high proportion of pupils with a foreign background. The opposite is true for schools with strong academic results.

In order to create groups of schools that allow us to examine teacher mobility on a level above transferring between individual schools, we used school-level information on the variables described above for the 44 schools in the area for which complete information concerning all variables was available. Information from additional five schools was incomplete and is therefore not included in the analysis. We standardised the variables and then performed a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the five indicators. The results of the PCA reveal that the five variables have an equal, and strong, rate of contribution to the first principal component and that the first principal component accounts for a very high degree of the overall variance (84%).¹ We therefore can consider this first principal component as a useful linear representation of a school hierarchy. Based on the schools position along this first principal component we grouped them into four equally sized groups (11 schools in each). Table 1 displays the differences between the four groups of schools along the used indicators where differences in pupil composition are the greatest between the strong schools of group 1 and the weak schools of group 4.

The interviews

The interviews were initially carried out in an inductive and exploratory way, covering many different aspects of the teacherś private and professional life histories. When interesting patterns were discovered, and theoretical ideas progressed, the analysis changed from the context of discovery to the context of justification (Swedberg, 2015). Thus, the technical aspects of the methodological design were fixed before they could be influenced by theoretical ideas. The final analysis, however, was theoretically informed and included a more structured reading of the material.

All four groups are represented in the interviews, and many of the interviewed teachers have experience from working at several different schools and school-groups. Many also have experiences from working at schools outside the studied area. When such schools have been brought up in the material, they have been categorised in the group that best correspond to its pupil composition.

Participants were selected on the criteria of working as a secondary schoolteacher in the area where the study was conducted as well as being a qualified teacher. When recruiting interviewees, a number of gatekeepers were used, who through their work in teacher education contributed with their network on the local school market. Several interviewees were recruited after responding to general mailings, while some were recruited through snowball sampling. From these different sample strategies, the overall variation of interviewed teachers became wide (in detail: see Appendix). The proportion of male teachers was one-fifth compared to a quarter at the national level (National Agency for Education, 2019), the interviewed teachers origined from a wide range of different social backgrounds (see Appendix) and six of the interviewed teachers had another ethnic background than Swedish. The interviewed teachers had between 2 and 40 years’ teaching experience. The variation of interviewed teachers eliminates, at least, obvious problems with the credibility of the data material.

The interviews lasted 50–90 minutes and focused on the interviewee’s teaching career and on experiences of professional teaching in relation to the schools they had worked in, including their present workplace.

When processing the empirical material, the transfers of each teacher within and between school-groups have been mapped to construct a mobility model. The interview material then offers accounts relating to the circumstances that prompted and surrounded these transfers. The mobility model shows how the interviewed teachers have moved, and the interviews contribute towards understanding why they moved in a specific way.

Mobility on the school market

Teachers change schools more frequently (Bertilsson, 2020) since the school market expanded in the early 2000s. In larger cities, the number of potential employers is higher. They are also characterised by a higher degree of social segregation, which means that the differences between schools become more pronounced.

Mobility patterns

A first observation was that Becker’s (1952) first career-path, that teacher mobility would strive to advance from weaker to stronger schools, could not be proven. The teachers were actively seeking to join schools in all four school-groups, but long transfers between groups on opposite ends of the scale were rare (see Table 2). When these occurred, they were mostly centred on pedagogy, e.g., when a teacher was actively looking for Montessori schools.

Table 2. Transfers between formative schools and arrival schools among interviewed teachers.

	Number
Teachers still working at their formative school	5
Teachers working at different school but within the same school-group as formative school	10
Teachers transferring up one step in the school-group hierarchy in relation to their formative school	6
Teachers transferring down one step in the school-group hierarchy in relation to their formative school	3
Teachers transferring down two steps in the school-group hierarchy in relation to their formative school	1
Either uncategorised formative or arrival school	4

One mobility pattern that could be observed however was that when teachers changed schools, they moved between schools within the same group or schools in adjacent groups. The mobility pattern, combined with the interviews, also showed that experiences from the school at which the teacher made their first significant professional experiences shaped the teacher’s future transfers between schools. These were the schools where they had their first long-term employment and will be referred to as formative schools since we observed that the school had a formative effect on how the teacher would come to define what it is to be a teacher. No pattern that revealed how the interviewed teachers chose formative schools could be found, though, and must be further investigated. The mobility pattern is illustrated in Table 2, where the interviewed teachers’ formative school and the school where they worked at the time of the interview (arrival school) have been included.

This means that Becker’s second career-path become relevant. Even if the teachers did not stay at a specific school, they seemed to stay within the same school-group or an adjacent one. They were mobile, but most often limited or immobile in their mobility.

Navigation and recruitment

In this section, we pay attention to what school teachers transfer to when they changed job, and why they transferred to that particular destination. In the teachers’ stories of how they found their next job, random chance and circumstances are key ingredients, but the mobility pattern mentioned above indicates that powers beyond randomness helped structure these career paths.

There are two empirical ways to explain this structure. First, navigation is when a teacher has an expressed preference for a specific type of school. Second, recruitment, is when a teacher is being “drafted” to a specific school by a former headmaster, former colleague or someone who knew the teacher through other professional or private contacts. There is no strict distinction between these explanations since they can appear simultaneously when a teacher gets a new position, and they both includes an idea of the teacher’s suitability at a specific school.

There were multiple examples of teachers who framed their change of schools as an active navigation, meaning that there was a stated destination which also allowed them to avoid certain other destinations.

I have never been interested in teaching in Area X or Area Y [city districts dominated by schools in group 1 and 2], for example. / … / And I feel like this is where I can make the greatest difference. (Ester, group 3)

A similar sense of determination was expressed by Hailey, who had a specific destination in mind when the time came to change schools:

Hailey:

And everything that happened in the City happened in Area Z [area exclusively serviced by group 4 schools]. When people talked about pupils with Swedish as a second language and national initiatives, it was in reference to Area Z. And that was when I thought “that is probably where I want to be”. So, I applied for a position here.

Interviewer:

So, it wasn’t the case that there were several schools in the City you could have seen yourself working at?

Hailey:

No, there really wasn’t. I wanted to go to Area Z. (Hailey, group 4)

Victoria referred to (un)desired parental contacts as a significant benchmark when navigating from a group 3 school to a group 4 school:

But there are, I like to say that there are two types of school. One school where the parents chase you, and one where you chase the parents. So, you just have to make up your mind, what kind of teacher am I? And I would rather be a teacher that chases the parents. (Victoria, group 4 school)

Several teachers tried to avoid schools that had a reputation for being unruly (schools in group 3 and 4). Olivia said that “I am not going with School A [group 4]” because “I am not so desperate that I will choose that type of position”. Adam navigated from one group 1 school to another group 1 school because … 

/ … / what I want is to still be a teacher. At many inner-city schools in the City, the job is mostly being a sociologist [he probably means social worker] or police officer, not a lot of teaching. So, I looked up the merit points of the pupils here and took some references. (Adam, group 1)

The recruitment process can briefly be described as by Saga, who found a job because “I was headhunted by a former supervisor of mine” and regarding how she was recruited for her next job, she says “I had the best reference I could possibly ask for as the main head teacher of this school, his sister and I have been on the same teaching team” or Bianca, who said that she “had a friend who worked at School B and she said that ‘well, they need a teacher at School B secondary school, so if you apply for that job, you will probably get it”. Yngve provides an even less formal description:

I was at a concert and met one of my old colleagues, who worked as a special education teacher at the time. “Hey, you’re not looking to change jobs by the way?” “Yeah, I guess I am now that I think about it.” “Good, then I probably have a job for you”. (Yngve, group 3)

In the cases described above, the transfer occurred from a group 3 school to another group 3 school. The “recruiter” either had a direct or indirect experience with the recruited teacher, and the mobility pattern indicates that this teacher’s skillset and experience was deemed appropriate for the school the teacher was recruited to. Neither navigation nor recruitment led to upward mobility in the school hierarchy. Instead, it appears that teachers remain in the school segment where they started their teaching career.

Synchronisation

An explanation of the identified mobility pattern is that these are processes which can be likened to synchronisation between the teacher’s subjective beliefs and the specific school’s local institutional logic. The teacher incorporates what they recognise as the necessary working methods and professional approaches used to organise the work at their formative school. The recognised local demands of how to do the job, around which the individual school’s work is organised, become internalised as the teacher’s own professional disposition. It is acknowledged as a self-evident logic with validity at the particular school. In the material, incorporation and synchronisation seem to serve as guiding principles for how the rest of the professional career should be structured. Yngve described how predominate collective beliefs at a school converged with his own as

… some kind of culture that becomes established when people work together long enough. I guess you become like the people you spend time with. If everyone else is acting a certain way, you eventually follow. (Yngve, group 3)

The quote is about how new colleagues become part of the school’s collective thought patterns, and in the long term contribute towards reproducing them when even newer colleagues arrive. This process was described by Nora. She was offered a permanent position at her school after a few years working as a substitute at different schools around the municipality. She spoke of her school as a place that “embraces a certain spirit” based on powerful collegial traditions:

We have something we call the School D Spirit. Uh, it is pretty important. We have had teachers who quit and then came back because they did not feel at home at other schools. Already when I came here for the first time, I felt that this was something different. I had worked at other schools as a substitute, and it was always a little restrictive, suspicious at the start, and it took some time before you were included, and even then, you never really became part of the community. But here at [School X], I felt at home already on the first day. (Nora, group 3)

Teachers who do not adapt to the school’s preordained working method don’t receive recognition for an adequate professional practice, which Nora expressed:

There are some who might not be as interested in relations and just focus on their teaching, and they wouldn’t really fit in here, because you first need to build relations, then they will eat out of your hand. If you do things in that order, things will be fine, but if you just go in and act like they just need to accept your teaching and “do what I say”, you will get chaos and things will not turn out well. (Clara, group 3)

Synchronisation is particularly important in the early phases of the teaching career as illustrated by Lucas, a certified upper-secondary teacher who did his in-service training at a prestigious upper-secondary schools in the city but got his first work at a group 4 school. He described his situation at the school, where he had spent two years at the time of the interview, as follows:

The pupils can be very different, things get really heated from time to time, a lot of fighting, but at the same time, there is a lot of love. / … / But I don’t think this is the right place for everyone. I think you need to have a lot of faith in the human interaction, in the social relational skills, in leading the classes and being a leader, I think that is really important. A lot of the classes will run you over if you come here thinking you are going to teach. Things are not that simple. It is not just about teaching and giving a lesson. It’s much bigger than that. I believe that when something becomes bigger than you imagined, it feels different too, somehow. You then feel like you are not looking at it with the same eyes. You develop it further. (Lucas, group 4)

This was not his initial experience. He took up his first position with completely different ideas, which his experiences at the school forced him to revise:

That is what it was like for me, I initially came here thinking that I was going to do this and I was going to do that. But the reality was quite different. Like, that is what I had to do, I allowed myself to be with the pupils, spend time with them outside, talk to them. I tried to create more of a separation between “All right, we are in class now, so treat it like class” / … / I think it is like I said, the reciprocity and the love you get. Pupils come up to you, they hug you, you greet each other, some of them high-five you. When I thought back to the other schools I had been at or done in-service training at, regardless, at no other school have I experienced this kind of highly apparent respect and reciprocity from the pupils. I am also aware however that not all teachers see things this way. So that’s why I am also saying that it is not for every teacher. / … / All of this is revealed in reality when you do it, you can’t communicate it in theory no matter what you do. You need to get it, and you get it through experience. (Lucas, group 4)

Knowledge from teacher training and the type of professional and often ideal perceptions he had obtained were replaced by perceptions and a professional disposition built on experiences from the specific school. It was at a group 4 school he defined his teaching profession and this made him adapt to the school whose local institutional logics he had synchronised his professional perceptions with.

You want to stay where you have built your castle, so to speak. However, I think there has to be some personal development to it all, that you stay and feel that you make a difference. (Lucas, group 4)

The experiences Lucas has gained can at first glance be likened to a superficial social adaptation. However, the mobility pattern indicates that the synchronisation that takes place in the early stages of a teacher’s career are significantly more permanent than adapting to the specific school where the teacher is currently working. Familiarity attracts, and what appears to be unknown is rejected, which shapes the teacher’s future career. For example, Diana said:

So, when I started there [group 4 School], it was very reminiscent of this school [group 3 school] as it is today. (Diana, group 3)

The synchronisation process appears to be tangible and creates slow-moving professional dispositions that strongly contribute towards structuring the future careers of teachers. The teacher’s career is directed towards places of employment that subscribe to the same normative structure and logics as the school at which their professional synchronisation took place. If the process occurs in a group 4 school, there is a sense of recognition and self-evidence when the teacher transfer to other group 4 schools, while the opposite is true if that same teacher transfer to a group 1 school. This is illustrated by Ines, whose formative school was a group 4 school, describing the choice of working at a group 1 school or a different group 4 school.

As soon as I walked in the door at this school [group 4], I felt that this is where I want to be. / … / It was the atmosphere, you know, how the air in the school feels. It felt welcoming, but at the other school [group 1], it didn’t. Not at all. It was a bit cold, you know, the teachers not greeting you, they barely looked at me when I came in. / … / Here, we became like a family. I barely understood that I was working in Area Z [area serviced by group 4 schools], you know. (Ines, group 4)

Later in the interview, Ines returned to how the process, described as synchronisation, influenced her reaction to different schools.

So that might also be influencing me, how things were done at that school [formative school]. I’m thinking, with that pupil base … I think that when you are in a school that is socially vulnerable, a little rougher, you become quite … the staff becomes quite informal, it is what you are used to. So, when I came to the other school [group 1] and saw that no one was talking to each other, I felt that I didn’t want to be there. (Ines, group 4)

Entering a school characterised by different institutional logics in relation to the one where the synchronisation process took place, and in relation to the professional disposition, creates friction and reluctance – experiences that influenced how she would go on to navigate in the labour market. The school market appears to have similar forms of structural limitations on the choices available to both teachers and pupils. This creates schools with a certain type of pupil and a certain type of teacher. The likelihood of the resource-poor pupils of group 4 schools encountering the professional view that characterises teachers who synchronised at group 1 schools appears to be minimal.

This line of reasoning also applies when schools change and “migrate” to a different group, where the habitual logics are different. When that happens, teachers leave. This was Olivia’s story. She described the group 1 school where her synchronisation took place as something of a “bastion”:

Once you were there, you stayed until retirement. You sat in the same chair in the teacher’s lounge, kind of like that. The truly old guard, you know. / … / Things were very conservative. Very knowledge-oriented and that was a little unusual at the time, because doing research was a big thing then … / … / And I loved it. You were supposed to know your subjects, you were supposed to know your stuff and you were to maintain order in the classroom, and that was the way it was supposed to be. (Olivia, group 1)

However, friction arose when the school underwent changes. A redrawn catchment area referred a larger proportion of pupils with weaker resources to the school, and the old established working methods no longer worked.

This was a whole new admission area and the new pupils kind of caught us off-guard as we were not prepared to handle this type of pupil. / … / The old pupils were very highly motivated to study and worked their butts off and did as they were told. / … / We were very poorly equipped to handle this. Here come these pupils of a completely different calibre and we need to be ready, but we had no help, and suddenly I noticed that this was a completely different classroom than I was used to. (Olivia, group 1)

The consistency created by synchronisation processes lost its power when the institutional logics at the school changed and her professional disposition encountered professional obstacles. The outcome was that the teacher no longer was able to do her job as she always did and was learned to do. This forced her to navigate to a different school. It was no surprise that she went to a group 1 school.

Conclusions

Teachers change schools for a myriad of reasons. However, this study indicates a pattern in how they move. They gravitate towards schools similar to the school where they had their first significant experiences as a teacher, their formative school.

This means that Becker's (1952) analysis of the stationary teacher, i.e., the teacher who stays at the same school to develop their position there, becomes interesting. The process that generates this immobility appears applicable to the material analysed in this study. The vast majority of the interviewed teachers change jobs, but these changes can still be characterised as a type, albeit modified, of “immobility” or, at least, moderate mobility, as they change schools within the same school-group or adjacent ones. This means that they can apply the professional orientation they developed at their formative school as they transfer to schools with similar institutional conditions and logics. The transfer of the mobile teacher is characterised more by immobility than by anything else. The teacher’s subjective ideas about the teaching profession have been synchronised with institutional conditions and logics at their formative school, and as a result, the teacher incorporates the local institutional logics of the school. Schools within the same group are familiar and without friction, and the teacher therefore qualifies them as potential places of employment. Theoretically, the school’s institutional logics correspond to the teacher’s institutionally formed and socially incorporated professional disposition. This might also explain Feng (2010) results in relation to ours and Parding et al. (2017). If the teacher is synchronised into a professional orientation where they are supposed to strive for more high performing pupils that is what will characterise their future career choices and also limit these choices in a similar way.

Our findings have two primary implications. Firstly, practically all (one exception) teachers who participated in this study can be regarded as “immobile”. The teachers move around within the same group or adjacent school group(s), which leads to few changes in terms of inflow of new professional orientations in the individual school.

Secondly, the school marketisation has both expanded and limited the teachers’ labour market. There are more employers to choose from and an increased total mobility, which means that the individual teacher’s chances of finding the right school are greater than before. The increased segregation has also meant that the gap between strong and weak schools has widened. The increased distance between schools in different groups therefore limits the real labour market available to teachers, and segregation is now not only an issue of differences between pupils, but also between teachers.

This reasoning can be understood as having lock-in effects on teachers. They have been professionally synchronised to function at a certain type of school and not others, and these effects are self-reinforcing. With increased differences between groups, teachers are more clearly limited to certain schools, which increases the concentration of a certain teacher type at these schools, something that Parding et al. (2017) contribute to an “increasingly divided teaching force, where ‘islands’ are created” (p. 121).

The findings of this study lead to new questions. In order to understand the power of the synchronisation process, the question of what teachers are being moulded into needs to be answered. What constitutes the teachers’ relative immobility on the labour market? Another related question is what happens when the local school market is not clearly segregated, as was the case in this study. Are the restrictive effects as evident in less segregated school markets?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Swedish Research Council [grant number 2016-03907].

Notes

1 PC 2 accounts for 7% of the variance and PC 3 5.4%.

Appendix

Table

Assumed name^a Gender	Age	Group formative school	Group destination school	Inherited educational resources^b
Adam M	43	1	1	2
Bianca F	38	3	2	2
Clara F	41	3	3	3
Diana F	41	4	3	3
Ester F	35	?^c	3	1
Freja F	49	?	4	2
Gabriel M	54	3	4	3
Hailey F	43	4	4	2
Ines F	41	4	4	2
Josef M	51	1	No transfer	2
Karl M	57	3	No transfer	2
Lucas M	25	4	No transfer	3
Molly F	54	3	1 and 3	2
Nora F	41	3	No transfer	2
Olivia F	56	2	1	2
Pia F	40	4	4	3
Quasim F	63	?	4	3
Rut F	53	3	3	1
Saga F	35	3	2	2
Therese F	52	2	1	2
Ulla F	65	3	2	3
Victoria F	50	3	4	2
Wilma F	44	2	No transfer	3
Ximena F	49	2	?	2
Yngve M	52	3	3	3
Zoe F	40	3	3	3
Åsa F	36	2	4	2
Älva F	35	2	3	3
Öbro F	42	3	3	2

^a The names are chosen by picking the most popular name with each initial, thus having no meaning in the description of the interviewee, except for gender.

^b The inherited educational resources are defined as the highest education among the parents. (1) professional, or higher education, (2) semi-professional education, (3) no academic education.

^c In some cases, it is unclear which group a school belong to because of lack of data or a school type that is difficult to fit in the model. We decided not to define these in terms of group because it might be arbitrary.